The present invention relates in general to the field of real time communications, and in particular to the transfer and creation of personal information during real time communications.
With the advent of pagers and mobile phones the wireless service industry has grown into a multi-billion dollar industry. Recently, duplex wireless devices have grown in popularity. Duplex wireless devices allow for the exchange of voice and other information over the same channel. This is advantageous for multi-use wireless devices that perform other non-telephony functions such as the administering of contact information, calendar information, cataloging of images, video and audio. Users of multi-use wireless devices take advantage of the duplex nature of their products to talk and to exchange information. Current multi-use wireless devices, however, do not come without their drawbacks.
One problem with current multi-use wireless devices is that voice and data cannot be transmitted at the same time. That is, one function must be suspended in order to perform the other function. Thus, if a first party is currently involved in a telephone call and he desires to send a file to the other party via the wireless device, the first party must suspend his telephone call in order to send the file. In addition to wireless devices, many other communication devices also suffer from similar drawbacks.
In today's global business environment, with the wide proliferation of wireless devices and the frequency with which business is conducted over these wireless devices, a large number of business contacts are made over the wireless devices. Consequently, a person is often not in the physical presence of his new contact (customer or client) and thus, when conducting business via a cellular phone, the person is unable to immediately present a business card to the contact. Therefore, the person has to resort to mailing the business card to the contact or providing his contact information verbally over the wireless devices. This mode of establishing new business contacts is not desirable, since it involves extra steps to get the business card to the contact and/or forces the contact to have to write the information down on a sheet of paper. With present cellular phone design, caller ID information is provided to a call recipient when a call is received on the recipient's cellular phone. The identified number may then be stored on the recipient's phone. However, this information is often limited to the caller's number, and the caller's name is often not provided for the recipient to recognize this number for later contact, the call recipient has to manually enter the remaining data that may be relevant, such as the caller's name and address, etc.